Friday, October 30, 2009

A new Associated Press investigation revealed that the purported environmental remediation specialist, Wayne Douglas Hansen, who secretly filmed meetings meant to catch Ecuadorian officials in acts of corruption has never owned a remediation company—as claimed—nor does he have any relationship with Honeywell Inc. as claimed in one of the videos.

AP reporters interviewed Hansen on the phone earlier this month. When they asked him the name of his company, he refused to answer. He instead described water treatment projects he is working on in Mexico and Ecuador. When the reporters questioned him about details of these projects, he hung up.

The AP investigation also uncovered Hansen's repeated run-ins with the law, ranging from letting his pit bull go wild on a neighbor's dog, to conspiring to smuggle 275,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia into the United States! (He was convicted and served time in federal prison.)

The investigation shatters Chevron's attempt to portray Hansen as a sincere, concerned citizen who hand delivered the supposed bribery videos out of a sense of civic duty.

What remains to be uncovered is: one, the extent to which Hansen's involvement in the video scandal constitutes a federal crime for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and two, whether Chevron knowingly participated with Hansen in illegal activity to get their hands on a "smoking gun."

An article in the New York Times today outlines the latest findings about the American, Wayne Hansen, who supposedly owned a remediation company, and who Chevron claimed made secret videotapes to expose "corruption" out of the goodness of his heart. Well, turns out that almost everything the guy said about who he was and who Chevron claimed he was is a lie – he does not own a remediation company, he has never done any remediation, and he is a convicted felon (For trying to smuggle 275,000pounds of drugs).

And this brings up a serious question: if the guy isn't who Chevron says he is, and if he wasn't actually looking for remediation contracts (since he didn't have a remediation business), what was he doing in meetings, asking leading questions, while he secretly videotapes it? Why was he in that room? More and more signs are point towards Chevron, the only party that benefited from Hansen's attempt to undermine the trial in Ecuador.

HOUSTON — An American whose secret recordings have placed him at the center of a $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador is a convicted drug trafficker, records show, throwing another complication into a case already tainted by accusations of bribery and espionage.

The lawsuit pits Ecuadorean peasants against Chevron over oil pollution in the Amazon and has been a major headache for the company for nearly a decade, producing a saga that underscores many of the hazards and ethical challenges of oil companies working in the developing world.

The company appeared to gain the upper hand in August when it revealed video recordings — captured on watches and pens implanted with bugging devices — that suggested a bribery scheme involving Ecuadorean officials, and possibly even the judge hearing the case.

But the company was put on the defensive again on Thursday, after lawyers for the peasants revealed that one of two men who made the tapes was a convicted felon. Court and other records provided by the plaintiffs show that Wayne Hansen, the American who helped make the recordings, was convicted of conspiring to traffic 275,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia to the United States in 1986. He also was sued successfully in 2005 by a woman who accused him of unleashing his two pit bulls to attack her and her dog.

The disclosure adds more questions about what motivated Mr. Hansen and an Ecuadorean partner to record meetings for Chevron's use, which the company has characterized as an act of whistle-blowing by men offended by unethical behavior and evidence that the handling of the case had been flawed.

"It's another blockbuster development in a case that never runs short of them," said Ralph G. Steinhardt, a professor at George Washington University Law School. "It doesn't necessarily mean there was no bribery plan, but anything that undermines the credibility of the witness undermines the case of the party that would call that witness."

Trevor Melby, Mr. Hansen's lawyer, did not deny his client had a criminal history, saying, "The thing about felony convictions is they follow you to the grave, but even if he had 15 felony convictions it wouldn't change the tapes." Mr. Melby said he was not being paid by Chevron.

The origins of the case go back to the 1970s, when Texaco operated in partnership with the Ecuadorean state oil company to produce oil in the Amazon. Peasants filed suit in 1993, saying that the company, which had ceased to operate in Ecuador by then, had left an environmental mess that had caused illnesses among villagers. Chevron bought Texaco before the case could be resolved.

Chevron has long said that it could not receive a fair hearing in Ecuador before a hostile judge and government. That argument seemed to be reinforced by the recordings obtained by Mr. Hansen and an Ecuadorean man who had worked as a contractor for the company. They showed an Ecuadorean political go-between working to obtain $3 million in bribes for environmental cleanup contracts to be awarded after the case ended.

But it remained unclear why Mr. Hansen was involved in the discussions. The plaintiffs said that an inquiry into his background by a private investigator found that Mr. Hansen did not hold an engineering license, never finished college and showed no record of being qualified to remediate pollution as he portrayed to Ecuadorean officials in the tapes.

Chevron has said it had no involvement in the videotaping, and company spokesmen have said Mr. Hansen was never their point of contact. "We've had no association with this guy," said Donald Campbell, a Chevron spokesman. "This issue is the content on the video and the transcripts that we turned over to the prosecutor general of Ecuador and the U.S. Department of Justice, which shows inappropriate meetings by the judge in our case, extensive government interference in the trial and a bribe plot involving $3 million."

The other man involved in making the recordings, Diego Borja, has since been moved to the United States with his family at Chevron's expense, and he has been receiving an undisclosed amount of living expenses.

No bribes were shown in the tapes, but the plot supposedly included Judge Juan Núñez, who was presiding in the case. Mr. Núñez recused himself, though he says he did nothing wrong.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Chevron's spokeswoman and resident "Misrepresenter in Chief" Silvia Garrigo was at it again during an interview with CNN's Rick Sanchez on Oct. 22. Garrigo, who professes to love the environment, last made headlines with her abysmal performance on CBS News' 60 minutes, where she dismissed health concerns in Ecuador's Amazon by comparing cancer-causing toxins in oil to the makeup on her face. This was Garrigo's classic line:

"I have makeup on, and there's naturally occurring oil on my face. Doesn't mean that I'm going to get sick from it."

The experts who run Chevron's embattled public affairs office either have very few options, or they apparently thought Garrigo's comparison of contamination to makeup was solid enough to put her on CNN. Garrigo was responding to Kerry Kennedy's account of her heartbreaking visit to the Ecuadorian rainforest where Texaco (now Chevron) intentionally dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste and abandoned over 900 unlined waste pits while operating a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990.

Kennedy, a mother of three and a longtime human rights advocate, described in detail the devastation she witnessed as a result of improper operating practices by Texaco (now Chevron). She told of the gasoline-like smell coming from the runoff from pipes intentionally designed by Texaco to discharge oil sludge and waste water from the pits directly into the rivers and streams used by the indigenous communities in the area for drinking, bathing, and cooking. She also recounted stories from the indigenous communities of rape and abuse at the hands of Texaco employees. This would not have occurred, she argued, if the residents were living in this country.

In response, Garrigo chided Kennedy for spending only a few days in the region -- as if it takes more than a few minutes to understand that huge open pits of oil, left untouched since Texaco abandoned them many years ago, are a mess that needs to be cleaned up. (Kennedy's trip is a few days more than any member of Chevron's management or Board of Directors has spent in Ecuador. No person with any real authority at the company – including outgoing CEO David O'Reilly, incoming CEO John Watson, outgoing General Counsel Charles James, and new General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate -- has been to the affected region of Ecuador.)

Garrigo then presented three arguments that she desperately wanted to share with the American public: 1) That Texaco had remediated its portion of the contamination and that what Kennedy saw was now the responsibility of Ecuador's government; 2) The cancer claims are false (Garrigo's apparent personal favorite); and 3) The Ecuadorian judiciary is corrupt.

All three arguments, not surprisingly, are either misleading or outright lies. The facts are as follows:

Garrigo: Any contamination Kennedy witnessed was caused by Petroecuador, Ecuador's state-owned oil company that inherited Texaco's well sites in 1992 when Texaco left the country.

Fact: Contrary to Garrigo's claim, Kennedy visited well sites built and run exclusively by Texaco. Aguarico 2 was solely operated by Texaco from 1974 to 1990 and then closed. This site was never operated by any other oil company. Kennedy dug mere inches into the ground before discovering oil in the soil, which is leaching into groundwater and ending up in the nearby stream where local residents drink the water. Kennedy saw the same contamination at Shushufindi 38, a pit opened by Texaco in 1975 and closed by Texaco in 1976. She also saw well site Aguarico 4, which was operated by Texaco from 1974 to 1984. In other words, Kennedy saw unlined waste pits built and closed by Texaco in the 1970s and 1980s that are still causing pollution today.

Texaco's so-called "remediation" cited by Garrigo involved fewer than 16% of the 916 pits that Texaco built. The remediation has been proven at trial to be either ineffective, or a complete fraud. Independent inspections of Texaco's "remediated" sites have found extensive levels of contamination, often thousands of times higher than the Ecuadorian norms that establish when human health is at risk. In fact, two Chevron lawyers and seven former Ecuadorian government officials are now under indictment for fraud connected to their involvment in the certification of the "remediated" pits. One of the Chevron lawyers under criminal indictment, Ricardo Reis Veiga, is thought of so highly by the company that he is still running Chevron's downstream operations in Latin America. (Reis Veiga also supervised Garrigo for several years on the Ecuador trial out of Chevron's office in Coral Gables.)

Garrigo: Any claims about health impacts in Ecuador from exposure to oil contamination are false.

Fact: It is well-established that exposure to any number of the chemicals and compounds that makeup oil is linked to higher instances of cancer – and numerous, peer-reviewed studies show elevated instances of cancer in the region of Ecuador which Texaco contaminated.

Is there anyone outside of Chevron who seriously believes there is no connection between consuming water and foods contaminated with oil and cancer? The independent, peer-reviewed studies measuring the impact of contamination on the health of people living in the Chevron concession area have found that cancer rates were anywhere from 1.7 to 4 times greater than for people living outside the area. One study found that the risk for spontaneous abortion was 2.34 times higher among woman living near the contamination. Based on survey data, the court Special Master calculated 1,401 excess cancer deaths resulting from the contamination. (Texaco, in the 26 years that it operated in Ecuador, never conducted a single health evaluation in the region nor took even one soil or water sample to determine if its operations were causing contamination.)

Garrigo: The courts in Ecuador are "corrupt to their core":

Fact: As Kennedy noted in her interview, the plaintiffs originally filed the lawsuit in New York Federal Court in 1993. Texaco and then Chevron fought to have the case removed to Ecuador arguing in 14 affidavits that the Ecuadorian judiciary was not only the more appropriate forum, but that the judicial system was competent and fair. Chevron won that battle, and the same case was re-filed in Ecuador in 2003. Once the trial started and evidence pointed to Chevron's culpability, Chevron changed its tune and started to attack the very courts it previously had praised. The animating principle: praise courts when you think you can win, condemn them when you think you are going to lose. But as Garrigo said on 60 Minutes when she got cornered by correspondent Scott Pelley, the reality is there is no court in the world that Chevron would agree to because Chevron is above the law and the claims relating to the pits Kennedy saw are "frivolous".

In reality, Chevron has tried to corrupt the Ecuadorian court process to derail the trial and evade a judgment – which explains why Chevron is under three separate official investigations for possible criminal violations relating to its misconduct in Ecuador. It also why Ecuador's Attorney General has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the company for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Garrigo asks about corruption? She should just walk down the hall. Garrigo's colleagues at Chevron have fabricated a false military report to cancel the Guanta judicial field inspection, have filed redundant motions to delay the trial, have threatened various judges when they refuse to rule in the company's favor, and have harassed and stalked the court-appointed Special Master to the point where he needed police protection. Just weeks ago Chevron discovered a "bribery scandal" that has all the telltale signs of a hoax perpetrated by the company to sabotage the trial. That doesn't count the numerous and anonymous death threats leveled at plaintiff's counsel during the trial – threats that don't seem of great concern to Chevron, which has remained silent on this most critical of issues.

At the end of the interview, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez asked Garrigo if contamination of the sort left by American corporations is "sullying our reputation in the world." She said she couldn't agree more but Chevron has always acted appropriately.

Chevron has always acted appropriately? From Ecuador (largest oil-related contamination on the planet), to Burma (where Chevron is partners with the repressive military junta), to the Philippines (where Chevron has caused spills, leaks, and fires in a residential area because of its oil depot), to Nigeria (where the company is accused of being complicit in an army-orchestrated killing of protesting villagers), at least some people on the receiving end of Chevron's misconduct would probably disagree with Chevron's Manager of Global Issues and Policy.

By its handling of the Ecuador case, it appears that Chevron not only doesn't mind sullying America's reputation. It also doesn't seem too concerned about its own reputation, either.

Had Michael Moore wanted to make a serious movie about capitalism, he would have made "Crude." Joe Berlinger's scorched-earth documentary and David-and-Goliath drama offers more than a few eco-outraged observations on the not-so-free enterprise system: As the film very eloquently implies, when the greater good is defined as profits, and a lack of culpability is proportionate to your number of shareholders, well . . . a lot of petroleum-soaked chickens will be coming home to roost.

For three years, Berlinger followed the now-17-year-old lawsuit against Chevron filed by 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorans, and the results are an eco-war strategy as might have been devised by Sun Tzu. Witnesses are prepped, strategies are rehearsed, judges are buttonholed and celebrities are stroked -- and this is the strategy of the "good guys," as they probably would be defined by Berlinger. While both sides in the case certainly are given their voice, it's unlikely that the director -- who enjoys a lucrative commercial career in New York -- would have been inspired to leave hearth and home by his deep sense of injustice over the sufferings of Chevron.

And yet, "Crude" is that rare thing in fiction or nonfiction cinema, a movie that relies on its audience to draw the right conclusions. Chevron makes a decent case for itself: It wasn't even in the Amazon from 1972 to 1990, when an alleged 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped there, sickening the inhabitants (notably the plaintiff Cofán tribe). But Texaco was, and Chevron took it over in 2001. And while much blame is assigned by all parties to the government-owned PetroEcuador, which has run the country's oil production since the early '90s, all the experts brought in to make assessments conclude that the damage is deep and old.

Chevron's motives are clear -- although the pending judgment against it is "only" $27 billion, it hardly pays to set a precedent and settle. When Pablo Fajardo, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, and his associate Luis Yanza receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2008, a Chevron spokesman is heard calling them liars. Lawyers for the Ecuadorans admit that a Chevron defeat could mean big fees. When we see Chevron's agents -- such as counsel Ricardo Reis Veiga, who has since been indicted for fraud -- they admit nothing.

Berlinger ("Brother's Keeper," "Paradise Lost") lets it play out artfully. The fact that Chevron's representatives come across as soulless shills is hardly his fault; he lets them present their case without comment. It's hardly his responsibility to make someone such as corporation scientist Sara McMillan appear less reptilian when she contends that there's been no damage to the jungle, no oil-related illness, no correlation between pollution and death. From what the viewer can tell, Chevron is a little like the guy who performed a little surgery and stole your kidneys: What kidneys? Prove you ever had kidneys! If the movie is any indication, Chevron would have the public believe there was no Amazon at all -- something people might be willing to believe, were Berlinger not sticking "Crude" in their faces.

Whew. 3.5 stars (out of 4) for a film that Chevron and its shills keep trying to attack as just an anti-Chevron film. Maybe they try and go after the film because the company's arguments ring hollow - so rather than deal with the reality on the ground, the company encourages sympathetic bloggers like Carter Wood to attack the film. And therein lies Chevron's entire strategy (and the root of the company's problems): treat the situation in Ecuador as an image problem to be managed, rather than a humanitarian and economic crisis to be solved.

Hopefully the film will start to wake the company up to the reality: they made a mess in Ecudor, and they now need to clean it up.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

This press release from FACES, a group which tracks environmental justice issues in the Philippines and the United States:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEOctober 22, 20093:30 PMCONTACT: Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity (FACES)Aileen Suzara, FACES510-409-8627, info@facessolidarity.orgUS State Department Gets It Wrong on Chevron's Operations in the PhilippinesSAN FRANCISCO - October 22 - Chevron Corporation's recent nomination to the State Department's annual Award for Corporate Excellence (ACE) for its Philippine-based operations was met with opposition from US and Philippine environmentalists. In response to the nomination, FACES sent a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging the State Department to rescind the nomination.

"Communities are suffering from Chevron's toxic emissions, catastrophic spills, leakages, and the risk of fires and explosions," said Mari Rose Taruc, FACES Chevron Campaign Coordinator. "Nomination to the ACE award ignores Chevron's negative impacts on the health of communities in the Philippines and around the world where they operate."

FACES open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted Chevron's toxic operations in the Philippines. "Chevron Philippines is no corporation to be proud of, not by the US or the Philippines. A little corporate donation to a local project does not replace the many lives lost or harmed due to their toxic operations in the fenceline communities of the Manila oil depots, as well as around the world where they operate," said the letter.

Philippine civil society and environmental groups have campaigned for years for the relocation of the massive Chevron oil depot out of Pandacan, a residential district in Metro Manila. An estimated 83,000 residents are directly impacted by the depot. Accidental spills, leakages and fires have overwhelmed the community over the years. A study conducted by Global Community Monitor in 2002 detected high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen and component of gasoline, in the air around Pandacan.

Yet despite opposition from the community and Church leaders, public health concerns, numerous ordinances, and a 2007 Supreme Court decision that ordered Chevron to relocate their depot for the "protection of the residents of Manila from catastrophic devastation," Chevron has continued to stall out this order.

"We are asking for relocation of the depot to an area with a proper buffer zone, away from the nearest communities. This is a holocaust waiting to happen," said leaders of Advocates for Environmental and Social Justice (AESJ). AESJ is among the Manila-based groups currently leading a campaign to relocate the depot.

Monday, October 19, 2009

The tale that Chevron told about how two men secretly recorded a bribery scheme in Ecuador is a very different tale today from the one Chevron unveiled seven weeks ago on YouTube and through the news media. Chevron's attempt to use the bribery scheme to derail a potential $27 billion lawsuit for oil contamination in the Ecuadorian rainforest could turn out to be as big of a corporate scandal as the pretexting debacle at Hewlett Packard.

Below is a quick comparison of Chevron's original version of the story and what we know today. For more information, take a look at this complete list of Chevron's unanswered questions about the purported bribery scandal, and this compilation of media reports about the purported bribery scandal.

Garcia said Borja's office is in the same building as Chevron's legal team in Quito and that Borja's family owns the office building.

Borja is not just a "former logistics contractor" for Chevron. He worked on the lawsuit for Chevron, helping to obtain soil samples for contamination testing as recently as March, only a few weeks before the first meeting with Garcia was secretly recorded.

If Hansen is a businessman with an expertise in oil clean-up work and who owns his own remediation company, he does not advertise his services. (Chevron has confirmed that the only "Wayne Hansen" listed on any internet search engine is not the same Wayne Hansen who filmed the meetings.)

Despite what Chevron said about not paying for their services, Chevron paid Borja relocation expenses for him and his family to move to the US and for "interim support." Chevron has offered to pay both men's legal fees for the two top criminal defense lawyers Borja and Hansen have hired. The lawyers work in San Francisco, only a few miles from Chevron's headquarters in San Ramon.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Chevron's bloggers, who continue to deny the truth about the company's involvement in oil contamination in Ecuador, are upset with a New York Times photo of a waste pit in Ecuador that ran last Saturday.

Chevron apologists such as Carter Wood – who blogs for the National Associat

ion of Manufacturers, which counts Chevron as a major donor – have said the photo is of a waste pit by Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, because the oil is fresh and Chevron left the country in 1992. But in his hurry to carry Chevron's water, Carter again misses the boat with his analysis.

Evidence at the trial demonstrates that Chevron's predecessor company, Texaco, constructed 916 unlined waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s. All were gouged out of the jungle floor without lining, in violation of U.S. and industry standards dating to the 1920s. Almost all of the pits had pipes that ran the toxic contents into nearby streams relied on by the local population for drinking water; in most cases, the toxic contents have migrated through the bottom of the pits to contaminate groundwater used for wells by local residents. If you want to see for yourself, check out the 60 Minutes report on the case.

This is clear evidence of the reckless indifference to human life that characterized Texaco's operations and Chevron's defense. Texaco had so little regard for the locals that Chevron had to admit that Texaco never even kept a list of the existence or locations of the pits, each of one of which is a hazardous waste site. The use of these reckless operational practices might explain why several independent health evaluations show skyrocketing rates of cancer in the region, and why the court Special Master found 1,401 excess cancer deaths. If this had happened in the U.S. it would probably be considered negligent homicide – and those that designed and built this system would probably be in jail.

Not that Wood cares. According to him – in a line he lifted directly from Chevron's talking points - if the oil in the pit is liquid then it must have been put there recently, which means the NYT photo could not be of contamination in a pit that Chevron left Ecuador in 1992. That's simply not true, according to evidence at trial. Dozens of Texaco waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon that were never touched by Petroecuador look exactly like the one in the NYT photo – even pits closed down by Texaco in the 1970s and 1980s. Check out this picture (taken in 2005), which is of Texaco site "Lago Agrio 5" which was closed in 1972 – and which hasn't been touched by anyone since it was closed by the company that year. Oil in old pits does not weather in Ecuador because it rains constantly in the Amazon, keeping the sludge in the old waste pits in the exact form one sees in the NYT photo. Even if the pit is now owned by Petroecuador, it does not absolve Chevron of its responsibility for building it, operating it, and abandoning it – and for the continued damage caused by using the same methods by the subsequent operator.

Chevron and bloggers like Carter Wood have consistently lied and misled the public, shareholders, and the media about Chevron's role in Ecuador. Chevron has tried every trick in the book – from creating its own news reports designed to look like CNN reports (including hiring disgraced former CNN correspondent Gene Randall to give the recordings an "authentic" appearance), to its latest Nixon-style dirty tricks operation to undermine the Ecuador trial where Chevron faces a substantial liability. Now, Carter Wood, on behalf of his organization's client Chevron, is asking people to not believe what is evident in a photo.

As Chevron's game of smoke and mirrors unravels, look for more misleading postings by Carter Wood and Chevron's cohort of bloggers. After all, Wood readily admits that he took an all-expense paid trip to Ecuador - paid for by Chevron of course - to get educated (read indoctrinated) on the issue. What he doesn't admit is that he failed to speak to any of the people who are trying to hold Chevron responsible for ruining their land and their lives. As a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Wood should know better than to write about an issue without talking to both sides or disclosing that he is paid to support one party to a dispute.

So please Carter, stop trying to fool people with misleading arguments about oil liquidity and photos - people are not that stupid in the reality-based world.

Kerry Kennedy, who toured parts of the Amazon province of Sucumbios by invitation of the plaintiffs to witness ecological damage, promised to lobby hard back in the United States.

"When I return home, we'll mobilize the human rights and environmental communities," said Kennedy, who is president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. "We'll call on political leaders in the United States to investigate Chevron and its practices."

The plaintiffs, who say they represent 30,000 inhabitants of the region, are seeking damages for cleanup and to compensate for illnesses they attribute to oil-drilling contamination from operations carried out by Texaco.

Chevron Corp., which bought Texaco in 2001, says it was absolved of any liability by a 1998 agreement with Ecuador's government that followed a multimillion-dollar cleanup.

The plaintiffs contend the cleanup was a sham and say the agreement doesn't protect Chevron from claims by third parties.

Chevron must be held responsible and compensate the local populations, Kennedy told reporters in Ecuador's capital, Quito.

"Exxon Valdez was an accident," she said. "What happened here in Ecuador was done on purpose."

In a statement, Chevron invited President John F. Kennedy's niece to meet with its representatives and learn the company's side.

Chevron accused the Ecuadorean state oil company Petroecuador of being responsible for the damage, not Texaco. Petroecuador was a partner in the drilling consortium Texaco operated before pulling out in the 1990s.

Chevron has long claimed it can't get a fair trial in Ecuador. It contends the judicial system is corrupt and recently released tapes it claims implicate the judge in the case in a bribery scheme.

Judge Juan Evangelista Nunez denied any wrongdoing but nevertheless recused himself — likely delaying a ruling that had been expected later this year for a case initially filed in 1993 in a New York court.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

It appears that corporate excellence isn't what you do anymore, but how much you're willing to pay. With a potential $27 billion judgment looming in Ecuador over oil contamination, Chevron has been working hard to hide its toxic legacy and promote itself as a corporation with a reputation worthy of honor.

But, instead of working to actually improve their image on the ground, Chevron has been hard at work currying favor at the State Department and throwing money at everything but the hundreds of pits of oil littering the most diverse region on the planet.

The company also paid for its own full-page, color Washington Post ad to congratulate itself on receiving the Richard C. Holbrooke Award for Business Leadership. Holbrooke, not surprisingly, now works at State, serving as the President's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.http://www.newsweek.com/id/205546/output/print

The oil giant has most recently gotten itself nominated as a finalist for the Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/oct/130172.htm.A stunning coincidence following, as it does, hard on the heels of these generous financial payouts.

To be clear – we're not arguing that contributing to various projects like these is a bad thing, only that Chevron cannot try to hide their bad acts in countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Burma by contributing some money to the World Expo and fighting AIDS in Africa. While those are worthy projects, the company cannot balance the scales of morality by doing some good over there while ruining people's lives and polluting lands over here. It's like going to McDonald's and ordering a Big Mac and large fries but getting a Diet Coke – sure, the Diet Coke is better than a regular Coke but it doesn't make the Big Mac any better for you.

But it seems like Chevron isn't interested in that message. Instead of adapting their policies to finally fulfill their legal and moral obligations and to be a better corporate citizen, Chevron has instead chosen the strategy of using its record-breaking profits to buy itself a good corporate reputation.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Last Friday an editorial blasted Chevron's newest tricky legal maneuver: an attempt to freeze out the rights of more than 30,000 indigenous people by moving the trial (that they asked for!) into a secret international arbitration. The editorial clearly lays out what Chevron is attempting – read on:

latimes.com

Editorial

Chevron's shifty shifting of venue

The oil giant, facing a $27-billion damage claim in a pollution case brought by natives in Ecuador, shops the case to The Hague in a bid to escape liability.

October 2, 2009

When Chevron was in a New York courtroom battling a lawsuit by thousands of indigenous Ecuadoreans, it argued that the case rightly belonged in their country. But now that the company is poised to lose in the Andean nation and could be assessed as much as $27 billion in damages, it says Ecuador isn't the right place either. Last week, the oil giant shopped the case to yet another court, filing a claim at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

Chevron has long maintained that it would appeal an adverse decision, which is entirely understandable. But this action is different. By going to The Hague before a verdict is issued in Ecuador, the company shuts outthe private citizens who brought the suit and who have no standing there. This reframes the case as between Ecuador and Chevron, and if it succeeds -- shifting liability from the company to the Ecuadorean government -- it could have a chilling effect on people all over the world who are engaged in legal battles with multinational corporations.

Let's be clear: The case wasn't brought by Ecuador. It was filed by people who say they have suffered serious personal harm, illness and environmental damage as a result of oil operations in their homelands. From the very beginning, Chevron has been trying to turn the focus away from these people and to pin the responsibility for the pollution on the government of Ecuador. After the suit was filed, the company got a waiver from Ecuador releasing it from all claims by the government. But the waiver didn't successfully stop third-party claims. So, in 2004, the company asked a federal court in New York to force Ecuador's state-owned oil company to indemnify it for any judgment in the case. The court rejected that claim in 2007, and in 2008, a three-judge panel for the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.

Now Chevron, which once agreed to abide by the Ecuadorean court's ruling, says it has no choice but to seek an international remedy in The Hague because it cannot get a fair trial in the Amazon. To bolster that contention, it recently released videotapes that it says depict the judge, Juan Nunez Sanabria, prematurely declaring Chevron's guilt. The tapes are unclear as to Nunez's intent, and he maintains that no impropriety occurred. He recused himself from the case to avoid becoming a distraction but has since been reinstated.

The real problem for Chevron, however, isn't jurisdictional or procedural. Nor is it about biased justice in New York or Ecuador. The issue is the devastating contamination in the Ecuadorean Amazon, the individuals whose lives have been affected and the importance of accountability. No matter where this case is tried, that's not going to disappear.